Current GOAL

Please drop this item in rural OR Premium Member Only caches. Do not place it in an urban cache or abandon it at a caching event. Transport the bug in the original plastic bag for as long as the bag lasts; the bag keeps the trackable clean, preserves the tracking number and prevents tangling with other items. Otherwise, take the travel bug anywhere you wish. No permission is needed to leave the U.S.

Travel bug photos in the logs are appreciated. I will re-post them here, where they can be seen by other cachers.

About This Item

Mount Rushmore National Memorial is a sculpture carved into the granite face of Mount Rushmore, a granite batholith formation in the Black Hills in Keystone, South Dakota. Sculpted by Danish-American Gutzon Borglum and his son, Lincoln Borglum, Mount Rushmore features 60-foot sculptures of the heads of four United States presidents: George Washington (1732–1799), Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919), and Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865).

South Dakota historian Doane Robinson is credited with conceiving the idea of carving the likenesses of famous people into the Black Hills region of South Dakota in order to promote tourism in the region. Robinson's initial idea was to sculpt the Needles; however, Gutzon Borglum rejected the Needles site because of the poor quality of the granite and strong opposition from Native American groups. They settled on the Mount Rushmore location, which also has the advantage of facing southeast for maximum sun exposure. Robinson wanted it to feature western heroes like Lewis and Clark, Red Cloud, and Buffalo Bill Cody, but Borglum decided the sculpture should have a more national focus and chose the four presidents whose likenesses would be carved into the mountain. After securing federal funding through the enthusiastic sponsorship of "Mount Rushmore's great political patron", U.S. Senator Peter Norbeck, construction on the memorial began in 1927. The presidents' faces were completed between 1934 and 1939. Upon Gutzon Borglum's death in March 1941, his son Lincoln Borglum took over construction. Although the initial concept called for each president to be depicted from head to waist, lack of funding forced construction to end in late October 1941.

I visited the site in 1950, with my parents and sisters. There was an uncrowded gravel parking lot and the visitor’s center was that shown in the Hitchcock movie “North by Northwest.” Outside the VC was an Indian who charged a dollar to have his picture taken; he looked every bit a chief in his buckskins and huge war bonnet. It was a wonderful experience for a kid.

In the fall of 2015 my wife and I visited the site (her first visit, my second). The rampant commercialization really offended me, for reasons I can’t explain. Where there was originally a snack bar, now there is a full-blown restaurant. Whereas I spent 15 cents for a lucky rabbit’s foot on my first visit to the gift shop next to the snack bar, this time I spent too much money for the waaaay overpriced racks and racks of trinkets like the one you are holding, trinkets I convert to travel bugs. There were busloads and more busloads of people, there were RVs keeping traffic to a crawl and cars filling a parking garage. There are so many people that one’s gets jostled when stopping to take it all in. Waiting your turn to take a photo is folly. Quiet contemplation is impossible. It is another example of ‘you can’t go back.”